GSS Travels to Vermont

In mid-May, Kevin Stark, Nick Lemcke, and Zack Ansell spent a week in the Winooski and Otter Creek tactical basins of central Vermont, ground-truthing wetland mapping for an NWI update project with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). The GSS team was joined in the field by wetland ecologists and environmental analysts from the DEC, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Regional NWI Coordinator. Vermont is a very diverse landscape and contains many different wetland types, including open water ponds, floodplains, marshes and swamps, bogs, fens, wet meadows, and vernal pools. Over the week, the crew traveled an area roughly between Montpellier, Burlington, and Middlebury, visiting various wetlands from the Winooski River floodplain to Chittenden Reservoir in the Green Mountain National Forest. Different focuses were on saturated forested wetland environments, agricultural fields, and river floodplains. The diversity of forested wetlands in the state is very interesting, with a wide variety of tree species including spruce, fir, cedar, tamarack, hemlock, ash, and maples.